Welcome to HEAT ON THE PAGE, a blog about my writing life, adventures in publishing, and my insatiable appetite for passionate prose.

What is heat on the page? It’s the feeling I get when I strip back each layer of artifice, cast aside every trick or gimmick of the craft, dump every unnecessary word, and finally stop hiding as an author.

To understand my writing life, you need to know something about my life.

I spent a good bit of my adulthood living as a smart, but stupid, woman.

I was hiding too much behind intelligence and information. I learned a lot of stuff, read lots of books and went to a great college, Columbia. I went to graduate school and earned a doctorate in history from Princeton University. I taught at Yale University. For the first four years on the job, I tried to run my academic career and live my life without paying attention to how I was feeling.

The habit of hiding was much older than the job, but I couldn’t see it then.

I tried to convince myself I had it all. I had married a nice, smart, and accomplished man. We seemed on our way to a bright future. I loved my undergraduate and graduate students and was an award-winning teacher. People who read my research and heard me talk about it found it fascinating. Editors encouraged me to publish ASAP.

What could have been wrong?

There were lots of things wrong. I felt them, but was too scared to name them.

I got sick all the time and couldn’t sleep. I carried more stress in my shoulders and neck than a ninety-minute massage could relieve. Did I pay attention? Did I stop and ask why I felt that way? Nope. I pressed on.

The more I hid the more my writing suffered. I always managed to put words on the page, but the academic writing essential to my career, was cold. It was frozen, and I hated to do it.

Then I stumbled onto the project where I discovered heat on the page. It was a project I began just to assure myself I wasn’t crazy. I began writing about my girlhood in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Whenever I sat down to write, I cried. I wrote, cried, and came alive. I kept writing because I couldn’t stop. But with a salary and a professional career to protect, I tried to confine the writing to nights and weekends.

The heat I managed to put on the page captivated me, and I stopped trying to fight it.

As I struggled to convey the truth of my early life, sometimes my words burned white hot and threatened to peel back my skin. Discomfort didn’t begin to describe my shock at what I’d written. I’d have to leave the computer.

My body started trying to cool down my mind. As I’d generate heat on the page, I’d actually sweat. Other times, phrases and ideas warmed me, and I lost track of time. Heat on the page emerged from the same place every time: the flaming column of honest emotion inside me.

I was hooked.

What happened? I’ll skip to “the end” of my story, and then fill in the details in later posts.

I am convinced that heat on the page was the reason my agent agreed to make me his client even though I hadn’t published before and he told me my proposal still needed work.

Heat on the page was what explained the responses of editors who hated my proposal as well as the ones who loved it.

Heat on the page, and a lot of luck, led several editors to meet with me.

Heat on the page was what made an editor make a pre-emptive offer on my book, The Black Girl Next Door.  It also enabled me to land a six figure book contract with Touchstone/Fireside, a Simon & Schuster imprint. I’ll tell you those stories in subsequent posts (but I won’t share my editor’s or agent’s names without their consent).

Today, heat on the page is my daily aspiration and high calling. More than hours logged at the computer or daily word counts, I know that I’m doing my job as a writer when I feel my pulse race. If I can’t feel some kind of heat, though, I know I’ve chickened out, taken a shortcut, cheating everyone including the reader and myself. Creating heat on the page is a demanding enterprise, as daunting as it is gratifying. But it’s the only way I know how to do it.

But how do writers create and maintain heat on the page? How do writers measure it? How do writers know if the words and ideas they’ve strung together are hot? That’s exactly what I want to discuss here.

I invite passionate readers and writers of all kinds to share their experiences. Everyone is welcome. I don’t profess expertise here, but I have certainly drawn inspiration from all over the place. I’ll share my own journey, but I’ll also point you to the heat on the page wherever I find it.

Let’s put some heat on the page.